MISSED AGAIN

Oh well, there you have it. The delegates to the General Conference of Malta's second largest party swiftly and decisively made like turkeys asked whether they wanted to introduce Thanksiving to the list of our holidays.

The received wisdom is that this means that George Abela's candidacy for theleadership is dead in the water. I'm not convinced, because stranger things have happened (hey, the PN won the last election, to start with).

However, given that a) the party machine isn't exactly enamoured of the idea of Abela becoming its boss and b) the delegates were quite vociferous of their rejection of Marlene Pullicino's motion, I wouldn't bet on him, unless Jason Micallef told me not to, in which case I'd consider having a flutter.

Why did the delegates not want to let the MLP's general membership have a say in the choice of leader?

Plenty of ideas are floating around. One idea is that the delegates are jealous of their power and the status this brings, such as this is. Another idea is that they were persuaded that an election amongst twenty thousand-odd card carriers would have been a logistical nightmare, which demands that another couple of questions be asked.

Would it have been such a nightmare and, if not (and I think not) why was the spectre raised?

Who benefitted by this?

Well, the answer to the last question is easy: anyone who doesn't want George Abela to take the helm, that's who.

And who would be in this not-exactly-enourmous band of brothers, pray tell? Ah, now, let's see: people whose jobs depend on having a leader who gazes upon them benevolently, perhaps? And who would these folk be? Ah, don't tell me, yes, that's it - the very people who would have had to organise the "logistical nightmare" that would have seen him elected.

Make no bones about it, the bottom line, from where I'm sitting, is that the wider electorate wasn't the stuff of which dreams are made for a certain clique of people, precisely because it would have meant that George Abela stood a very good chance of getting the nod. So that particular horse had to be nobbled, and sharply too. The way this was done was more subtle than an MC-style letter, though.

I know that the little elves will be commenting on my take. With deathly boring predictability, they will invite me to stop trying to interfere in Labour's internal issues and then go on to ask why the PN don't open up their own electorate.

Let me get my retaliation in first, then.

To start with, the MLP have a role to play in our democracy, for all that its not so ancient history appears to disqualify it from so doing. But all that is happily consigned to the rubbish bin of history, along with many (though not quite all, yet) of the exponents of "governance a la Labour".

Once it is a component of the state, it in the interests of all of us that it is run properly, and on the record of the last three incumbents foisted on the party by its General Conference (or is that the other way round?) can it be said that the MLP was properly run?

To be going on with, as I pointed out in one of my own comments to another section of this portal (I need to get a life) it is the function of a political party to win elections.

The PN's method of appointing its leaders and functionaries has won it the 1981 election, the 1987 election, the 1992 election, the 1998 election, the EU Referendum (dead people voting nothwithstanding) the 2003 election and the 2008 election.

Labour's method, on the other hand, got them leaders and functionaries that lost it the 1981 election, the 1987 election, the 1992 election, the 1998 election, the EU referendum, the 2003 election and the 2008 election.

There will be those who cavil that the 1981 election result was fair and legal - I'd invite those of them that are not too young to know what went on in those interesting times to recall why they were interesting and what that says about Labour legitimacy in government.

HISTORY AND WHO WRITES IT

It is an axiom that history is written by the victors. It is almost equally axiomatic that the Second World War was provoked exclusively by the thuggish antics of the Nazis, led by that utter madman, Hitler and that the Allies were led by the hero Churchill, whose policies, strategies and tactics were tough but fair.

A book which I'm fairly flying through this weekend, "Human Smoke" by Nicholson Baker (only an American can be called Nicholson, of course) shakes the foundations a bit.

Written in a style I've not come across before, in anecdotes recounting particular episodes, small or epoch-making but all equally material, without narrative but in time-linear format, the book paints a picture of the Allies, and of Churchill in particular, that is un-complimentary in the extreme.

I'm no historian, for all that I wish I had the time to take up history as a discipline, so my perception of the way the war was won comes more from the populist than from the academic. This is a direct result of the first axiom to which I referred, leading to the propagation of the second one.

Let there be no mistake, lest Holocaust-deniers such as Norman Lowell and delusionals of his ilk start crowing, Hitler was an out-and-out thug and his policies inhuman to the extreme, rendering him one of the few people for whom the death penalty, had he not chosen the coward's way out, would have been too good. It's just that this book has brought into sharp focus for me, and a bit abruptly, a concept that should have been self-evident, had I bothered to think about it. The Allies were guilty of brutish behaviour too.